Discussed in this essay:

Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, by Fredric Jameson. Verso. 272 pages. $34.95.

It is characteristic of literature departments to see waves come and go. Fredric Jameson represents something like the lapping at the shoreline, which doesn’t go away and never ceases to turn up interesting things: shells, coins, and specimens of marine life heretofore unseen. Not only has Jameson been ceaselessly productive—he has often come bearing news, for more than fifty years.

His topics might at first have seemed esoteric. They became increasingly less so. Jameson initially achieved renown in the early Seventies for examinations of European theories of literature. He explained to Americans a German-language tradition of Western Marxist thinkers. These critics, after the October Revolution, adapted Marx’s thought to the study of the art and culture of the nations outside the Soviet bloc. Many of the books he drew on were still inaccessible in English. Next Jameson essayed Russian and Central European formalists and linguists and their French descendants, the structuralists. (Canonical French literature, from Balzac to Sartre, had been his university specialization.) But it became clear that he was not looking to improve our understanding of individual writers or nations. Jameson was stocking his own armory, from the leavings and detritus of overlooked predecessors on all sides, and reconstituting a tradition he intended to join and master.

In 1981, he released the defining statement of his own method, The Political Unconscious, to redeem the critique of tacit ideological messages and obscured class struggle in novels by canonical writers. Then he came closer to intervening in the public discussion of ideas than most academic literary critics ever will. At that time, an art-historical debate had wondered for several years whether our age had moved beyond modern art and on to “postmodern” art. In a round of extramural lectures (first in 1982 at the Whitney Museum in New York), then an elegant essay refined over several published versions, and finally a book, Jameson put his stamp on the question. His diagnosis—using a panoply of examples from media high and low, from George Lucas films and Andy Warhol prints to hotel design and French theory, and taking them as forms expressive of a new phase of capitalism—became as much a part of the tradition of virtuoso definitions of art in the twentieth century as Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” and T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The title Jameson chose is well enough known to have had its pattern reused for jokes and homages in subsequent cultural commentary that aspires to the original’s breadth and reach: “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”

That would have been an exceptional career. (We have not even noted his sidelight on film.) He might have retired in 1999, at sixty-five, as one of the most influential literary critics of the second half of the twentieth century.

In 2005, Jameson surprised, instead, with a defining work on science fiction, Archaeologies of the Future. To him, the genre was not about technology or escape, but ways of thinking about utopia, as visions of a future radically different from those on offer in present politics. In 2007, 2013, and 2019, he published significant volumes redefining other epochs of literary history. These new efforts reviewed modernism, the core of avant-garde writing and visual art since the mid-nineteenth century, and tackled realism, with its more documentary or sociological depictions, held up as a rival predecessor. He continued to revisit the thorny question of the present, accumulating decades of evidence for his larger social, economic, and artistic vision. Jameson sees Eighties postmodernism as a particular moment of the underlying dynamic best named globalization; fluctuations in postmodern style are demoted in significance, but this larger phase of the arts is confirmed as a movement with the heft of its predecessors.

At ninety, Jameson is enjoying an unusual bounty of time to set the flowering of his late work in a suitable arrangement with his earlier creations. Three new books collecting occasional writings and transcribed lectures are appearing from Verso and Repeater Books this year. The most approachable, Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, carries a page in which twenty-eight of his books are sorted into fresh categories, led now by The Poetics of Social Forms, a masterwork in six parts and seven volumes tying together some of his best but previously disparate books. The first title, Categories of the Narrative-Historical—one hopes, an introductory and explanatory volume—is, rather charmingly, the only one still forthcoming.

For journalistic perspective, a critic Jameson might be compared with, in stature and longevity, but also fortitude and intransigence, is Harold Bloom, who died in 2019 at eighty-nine. The likeness becomes a study in contrasts. Bloom was born in 1930 in the Bronx, Jameson in 1934 in Cleveland. Both were surrounded by the combative seriousness of tone that literary criticism possessed in the Fifties, and preserved it in a more informal age. Where Bloom became insistently public, surely the most famous literary critic in American media culture, Jameson has an equal standing and fame within the academy, yet without, I think, having much name recognition outside it. Bloom was happy to play both genius and clown. He was unbothered by simplification in the service of public reach, temperamentally prone to self-caricature, willing to be mediocre in print, and ready to supply quotations to seemingly any journalist who called, while ardently defending the supreme value of great writing. To this day, in the halls of English departments, people who knew Bloom intimately will seek to reassure you that, beneath it all, he really was quite smart.

Jameson’s written persona is more consistently forbidding and, though colorful in its idiosyncrasies, keeps the reader resolutely at arm’s length. One knows him by reading him, through his tics and key terms, his unexpected affections (for the fascist Ezra Pound, “although I would have preferred the place of honor for Lenin rather than for Mussolini,” and William Faulkner) and poisonous loathings (for liberal illusions of aesthetics and ethics, like the “outmoded ethical binary of good and evil”). Jameson’s habit, or temperamental inclination, is to be uncompromising. The most personal piece of his writing that I have encountered, in tone at least, may be a short introduction, titled “On Not Giving Interviews,” to a modest collection of ten of them Jameson awarded, over twenty-three years, to journals sufficiently rigorous or obscure. His brief against interviews, he writes, is that they encourage one toward pithy sayings, appeals to readers, and “a deterioration in the language itself.” The temptation to portion out one’s cathedral of counterpoised and cantilevered writing into knickknacks certainly is vivid to him. His readers, visitors, supplicants, and fans may be perfectly reasonable in wishing him to express himself more simply and plainly; they may even deserve it. “For the interviewee, however,” Jameson says, “this formal requirement encourages bad habits indeed and turns the mind in the direction of concentrated formulations from which thinking only slowly recovers, if at all.” This mustn’t be risked.

One can admire both Jameson and Bloom. If it was a talent of Bloom’s to help readers insecure in the breadth of our reading, purchasers of The Western Canon and other titles, to feel we could put on some of his erudition through the praise or broad blame of his exaggerated judgments, it is an effect of Jameson’s writing, in even the dogged and devoted reader, to conclude that we have really read nothing correctly, or read all the wrong books, and that he would surely find us simpleminded and probably contemptible. Jameson wards the reader off. The prickliness and imperviousness of his prose in fact becomes part of its interest, along with its address to assumed comrades and ideal readers who are plainly not oneself. I lacked words for it until I read Jameson’s early characterization of the proper effect of Marxist literary criticism on the middle-class mind: It “refuses us in the very moment in which we imagine ourselves to be refusing it.”

Jameson, not incidentally, is a Marxist literary critic, again in a conspicuously uncompromising way. He is not simply influenced by Marx, by downstream traditions of the left, old or new, or of Marxisms West or East. He is not concerned with economics and material life and their manifestations in literature as explicit themes, or with working-class characters, or overt class conflict, or injustice. He is not just sympathetic or loosely committed to socialism. All these things are thick on the ground in literature departments, and none would surprise. Jameson is, by his own declaration, first and last a Marxist critic, in a direct line of genealogy from Marx and Engels through Plekhanov and Lukács. This is an aspiration, an existential commitment, and an identity. Beyond the issues of style or temperament, it may also help explain why his books are so refusing, rebarbative, even somewhat notably aggressive in their confrontation with any reader not already supine. For, as he writes, “Marxism returns against cultural activity in general to devalue it and to lay bare the class privileges and the leisure which it presupposes for its enjoyment.”

The epic quality of Jameson’s declaration that a Marxist critic is something to be, through all phases of his own career, and through many changing vogues, fads, tendencies, and political orders around him, has had everything to do with his sense of the office as knife-edged in this way, and his unshakable confidence that the devaluation of cultural activity by its class basis does not affect him. He never self-flagellates while his colleagues scourge themselves for assorted guilts. This mysterious immunity to bourgeois complicity seems to derive from the deep assurance that his project makes sense because he is a revolutionary Marxist critic. He insists on a militant Marxism as the one best discipline: explaining the present, annihilating other university habits, hostile to all pluralisms, and only partially in need of vindication as the critic awaits capital’s terminal crisis.

That is why it’s a particular pleasure and relief to judge that Inventions of a Present is incisive as usual, but also gracious. I can imagine recommending the book to an uncommitted reader without feeling guilty that they are about to be insulted, or stretched on the rack. As a collection of reviews, this slim book rides the caboose of Jameson’s enormous enterprise; consider it a taillamp that casts a gratifying glow over miles traveled. Inventions of a Present selects primarily from reviews of contemporary novels, offering glimpses of Jameson’s thought and latest preoccupations over five decades. Generally, the greatest writers frustrate in assemblages of their book reviews—Edgar Allan Poe, Willa Cather—because you wish they would just write their own work and not waste time summarizing books best forgotten. But Jameson, the expert academic, skips summary and heads straight for ideas and criticism. As he is not a jobbing newspaperman, he can afford to be choosy, and the novels he selects are often ones that matter, ones that capture some whole trend or moment.

The wish to hear Jameson at ease, as in an interview—to hear his genius flashing effortlessly, expressing his underlying commitments openly, even crisply—is rewarded in these reviews without sacrificing the effect of his involuted written language. I think I can endorse this volume as a simple introduction to Jameson, alongside his postmodernism essay (which is somewhat misleading as a specimen of his literary-critical work and thought). The book yields insights on a range of exhibits and is humanized by an unfamiliar sense of humor.

Inventions of a Present is satisfying on several scores. As a collection of core samples taken—almost accidentally, it seems—from the growth rings of Jameson’s writing life, the book gives succinct articulations, as if in passing, of some key concepts and arguments, impressively coherent across time but recording changes of emphasis and interest through the decades.

Jameson offers his assessment of the James Dickey novel Deliverance, the early-Seventies story of suburbanites battling rednecks in the wilderness on a canoeing vacation gone awry. He sees it as an allegory of bourgeois fears of challenges from below. The rednecks he interprets as a mask for Thirties left populism. He sees this recollection of a past threat to the propertied classes as expression of the real late-Sixties threats of the antiwar movement and Third World insurgency. As a series of ideological substitutions, it is not implausible. More stirring, though, is Jameson’s nearly classical statement of the power of literary art to reveal ideologies as the hidden principles of the ruling class that all of us must suffer:

The great writer always tends to thematize their ideological raw material . . . this is the privileged way in which such ideological material can be lifted to consciousness and made available to us as an object in its own right. Art thus allows us to walk all around these otherwise latent and implicit unconscious attitudes which govern our actions; to see them isolated as in a laboratory experiment for the first time, spread out and drying in the light of day.

Next he treats novels of Americans turning south in order to imagine their way into Latin American political upheavals and revolutions. He defines the “gringo novel,” practiced by artists as fine as Robert Stone and Joan Didion, as art that allows “North Americans” an

experience in this setting that they cannot find back home, in their own language. . . . Violence unmotivated by crime as such, or the familiar categories of criminal motivation.

Again, through ideological substitutions, it is the failure of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam that these authors are truly reliving. Their books’ fantasies of martyrdom and religious metaphysics are a feint so as not to recognize the need for socialism at home and abroad, and to obscure American stupidity. (“If we really want to be serious about ourselves, I think we have to admit that white America is characterized by two basic features: we are hypocritical as a people; and we are shallow.”)

In an account of the contribution that Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude makes to world literature, Jameson contends that its form allows a new picture of utopia, one that survives the constriction of history:

The solitude of the title . . . signifies autonomy. . . . It also signifies the uniqueness of Latin America itself in the global system, and, at another level, the distinctness of Colombia from the rest of Latin America, and even of García Márquez’s native (coastal, Caribbean) region from the rest of Colombia and the Andes.

To Jameson, García Márquez’s magical realism preserves the memory and aspiration of a wholly integrated society, even as it enters (or falls into) time, bureaucracy, and war. This peripheral novelist furnished countless other writers of dominated nations and groups a literary means of preserving traditional communities inside modern separations, in the face of violence and external empire—for, “despite Colombia’s eternal civil war, the enemy is always the U.S.”

As a selective reviewer, a reviewer de luxe, Jameson chose foreign novels that could illuminate geographies germane to his own interests. “Anyone with a commitment to socialism needs to take an interest in the history and fate of the German Democratic Republic,” he writes, and so East Germany in its four decades of Communist government is one such site. Jameson seeks accounts of its daily life instead of parables of repression, and finds them in long novels by Günter Grass and Uwe Tellkamp. Japan is another place of interest, particularly the world of Kenzaburo Oe as it reflects lessons of the antinuclear mobilization of the postwar Japanese left and

the possibility of forming groups—a political movement, an active collectivity, a return to the communal in some new form after the ravages of modern or modernist individualism.

He seems really to be enjoying himself in an ebullient review of Francis Spufford’s novel Red Plenty, a mildly counterfactual tale of the Soviet Union and its possible fresh start in the era of Sputnik. “The young still believe in socialism, as do their elders,” but “the release of older heavy industry to produce consumer goods” could enrich the lifestyles of Soviet citizens to rival those in the postwar reconstructed West. This mutation will not be

framed, as in the West, as the invention of something new . . . but rather as a continuation: the restoration of the original Soviet revolution, the starting up again of the original aims of Soviet communism.

Suppose scientific advances in the USSR had not just put a satellite into orbit, but found means of calculating an economy of sufficiency, even mild luxury, priced without profit, and equitably distributed. The point of this “wonderful novel” of the Soviet past, Jameson decides, is to ask “what if?, and to restore the freshness of an era in which . . . everything was possible.”

Closest to our own time and place, the “novel” in which he finds the profoundest practical interest proves to be the five seasons of the HBO series The Wire. Within its portrait of a postindustrial and decimated U.S. city, Baltimore, in the twenty-first century, Jameson detects spaces that part from “the officially dominant white culture”: the drug sphere, “like a foreign city within the official one,” and black Baltimore, distinguished from Baltimore,

like Harlem and the rest of Manhattan, like the West Bank and the Israeli cities . . . even like East and West Berlin today, where older East Berliners are still reluctant to travel to the former West, with its . . . whole capitalist culture alien to them for most of their lives.

Add the harbor docks, the last zone of industrial labor, which receive in container ships the goods that used to be produced at home. In each world, impossible alternatives are shown to be undertaken, outside official notice, simple and practical until they perish: the peaceful cartelization of drug sales, the localized legalization of drug purchase, a revival of the Port of Baltimore with funding from drug imports. This surreptitious organization of forgotten spaces opens glimpses of utopia: “There is at work a virtual Utopianism, a Utopian impulse, even though that somewhat different thing, the Utopian project or program, has yet to declare itself.”

One gets a look at Jameson’s famous prolixity in these reviews, too, in less overwhelming fashion. A consistent jargon has buoyed Jameson’s craft on the surface of the deep through more than fifty years of roving. In the latest review here, published in 2022 in the London Review of Books, one hears the same key words that plotted a course in his article for College English in 1972, the earliest. Jameson has never taken the shortest route between two points, or been less than excessive in paragraphs and pages, so it’s clarifying to detect here that his cardinal directions haven’t wavered: ideology, totality, utopia, and form.

The hopeful prospect is that these prose miniatures might also make those terms easier to comprehend. He does not necessarily use them in their general or accepted ways. Puzzling through some of his most famous books, I have sometimes wondered if the only living person who knows how to apply these terms, to Jameson’s satisfaction, is Jameson. One would like to take a secure heading on them and travel.

“Ideology” should be the most straightforward starting place, because of its history. Marx and Engels did not invent the word, but they made it their own. In The German Ideology, they gave their famous redefinition of the term in a series of aphorisms: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production.” Ideas that idealize and make common sense of the strength of the ruling class will be the ideology of any time and place. In Jameson’s usage, however, “ideology” becomes broader than the self-serving ideas through which the dominant justify their domination. It seems to mean any form, perspective, or thought that obstructs the discovery of the world as it really is. These obstructions—or “constructions,” if you like—come also in the shape of stories or artworks or representations. Alongside other interpreters who might critique opinion, common sense, and beliefs, or philosophies, theologies, and rules of logic, there is a special purpose given to the Marxist critic (of literature, art, or culture) to identify such obstructions in the creative media and give material and social explanations for their limitations and errors.

“Totality” seems to be used to mean the complete set of relationships between persons and persons, and between persons and material things, which make up the humanly meaningful world; or, perhaps, a corollary of this in the mind, the apprehension or adequate consciousness of such a totality. It includes how people’s labor or energy is organized, with what sorts of products, and how this can be compared with their real needs. No human has lived with easy access to such a totality since leaving traditional, premodern, and undifferentiated society, as in a tribe or clan where each individual has a place among a small number of known people, and a defined role in the struggle against nature. In increasingly differentiated societies, artworks give unique pictures of the interchange between individuals and their social worlds. But only Marxism, with its way of examining art for material determinations and historical shaping, can integrate these fragmentary images into revelations of the totality. “Not we, but reality itself is Marxist,” Jameson affirms near the start of Inventions of a Present.

“Utopia,” then, comes to mean almost any opening to consciousness of a healed human world, undivided, and less capitalist. Nothing truly comprehensive is required, so difficult is it, at any time, to imagine a true alternative to the known. Utopia is an action or imagination toward “a human world from which nature and economic contradiction have been eliminated,” Jameson says here. It is any glimpse of a “Utopian (or revolutionary) transformation and reconstruction of all of society.”

Finally, “form,” a word that does great and Atlas-like work in all disciplines of literature and art study, takes a central place in Jameson’s nomenclature, too. No content can take shape in thought or expression without a form. But forms are inherited, learned, and created inside the changing orders of social and material relationships that metamorphose over time. This means that complex, concrete efforts of expression—artworks—will give glimmers of the totality in its historical phases that can tend toward either the ideological or the utopian through their manipulation of form. An analyst attentive to forms, keeping a sidewise eye on the likely social content they attempt but an implacable attention to the geometry of their changing shapes, can read, from the evolutions and inventions of the forms themselves, a reflected shadow tracing or map of changes in the totality otherwise unseen.

Hence the promise of Jameson’s long-gestating masterwork, The Poetics of Social Forms. He advertised it in a footnote to The Political Unconscious in 1981: “I discuss the relevance of the concept of mode of production for cultural study in my forthcoming Poetics of Social Forms.” By Postmodernism, in 1991, he was using the title to assign the new book a place in an intricate architecture: “The materials assembled in the present volume constitute the third and last section of the penultimate subdivision of a larger project entitled The Poetics of Social Forms.”

The general idea would seem to be that just as Marx’s sequential picture of social and economic history, from primitive communism to slave societies through feudalism to industrial capitalism, implied specific forms of collective belief and organization of institutions as necessary consequences or correlatives, so Jameson would complete the Marxist literary critic’s project of investigating the “poetic” corollaries, arranging the formal capacities and limitations of myth, lyric, epic, allegory, realist novel, modernist text, and present-day document as each has arisen and persisted within a new mode of production. This is an easy effort to conjecture, but a very difficult thing to do.

In service of such historical comprehensiveness, Jameson has yoked some dissimilar books into sequence. Even the future is included, as prediction, or reflection of what we miss in the present, with his book on science fiction anchoring the whole. The earliest so far chronologically is the most recently published, Allegory and Ideology, from 2019, which includes pages on the Iliad and evidence that Jameson has lately been rereading the church fathers, Talmudists, and medieval Muslim exegetes.

The great Marxist art historian Arnold Hauser completed a masterwork of comparable span and intention, The Social History of Art, in 1951, now in four volumes. Hauser’s work was consecutive, comprehensive, and developmental. The patchy and adventitious quality of Jameson’s reconstruction must make clear his difference as a thinker. Jameson has always been associated with the “historicizing” impulse to set literary and cultural works into their date and phase of economic sequence. But he has never been a historian, nor has he meant to be taken as one. Every intervention, rereading, and retrospection by Jameson is about the present and the wish to shape the future.

I think it is fair to say that Fredric Jameson has been the white American literary critic most important to others who think of their area of study as “the present.” He has imbued its literary-scholarly study with urgency and a sense of titanic moment. His discoveries promise to upset the gaming tables of every school of thought that wagers on new and untested art for idlers’ rewards: the love of novelty, the will to make or unmake reputations, the wish to be hip or au courant. His purpose is familiar but rarely spoken, as likely to gain looks of stupefaction as of ardor: to measure the balance of forces at every moment and watch the globe, its nations, parties, and classes, whether of regressive or revolutionary tendency, seeking where and when the forces of progress might strike a blow; and to inspect each advance of capitalism in light of the possible dialectical reversal by which, in a manner unforeseen and at a moment not chosen by men, this greedy expansion might become the means of communist revolution and redistribution.

Jameson really is, at bottom, a committed revolutionary thinker, without boasting about it or belaboring it. He is notably far from being a precautionary humanist or left environmentalist, as he reminds readers in Allegory and Ideology:

We have to become aware of the degree to which radical efforts in the era of late capitalism have been conservative and traditionalist. . . . Umfunktionierung [repurposing or refunctioning] was Brecht’s word for the transformation of all the unlovely advances of capitalism’s universal accelerationalisms into humanizing achievements: the transmutation of ecological disaster into the terra-forming of earth, and of the population explosion into a genuine human age, an Anthropocene to be celebrated rather than caricatured in second-rate dystopias. . . . The social construction of late capitalism needs to be converted and refunctioned into a new and as yet undreamed of global communism.

Jameson’s theory of the present holds that, as the successive modes of production that Marx diagnosed and projected into the future can include stages Marx did not foresee, our late-modern mode can now be seen to have passed through industrial capitalism, then through the imperialism that Lenin identified as a second stage, to a third stage, as yet incompletely grasped. Jameson has always called it “late capitalism,” and he has followed its changing characterizations by other theorists. Late capitalism can be detected in diagnoses of consumer society and image society; in new epochal forms of electronically flowing finance capital and digital or informational capital; in globalization as a meta-imperialism coming from all directions, from the capitalists of all regions, as the globe and its lifeworlds are integrated into representations that interface with money.

Industrial capitalism found its artistic disclosures and mystifications in realism. The realist novel, especially of the city, was still a local microcosm of the capitalist system in action. Monopoly capitalism and imperialism found their forms in the broken, fragmented, subjectivized paths of modernism and modernist fictions. These returned glimpses of the overseas engines of metropolitan wealth, in the powerlessness of minds alienated from the real theaters of economic action, an order complex and differentiated beyond individual effort. Globalization’s art forms can be classed with postmodernism, but Jameson suspects that they struggle to narrate, and fictionalize, at all. They fall back instead on “information” outside the boundary of the self (and perhaps on autofictional recording within it). Individual, exemplary persons with their unique locales (whether Paris, France, or Winesburg, Ohio) have melted into a worldwide sameness of preferences, worries, desires, satisfied by the same brands, through the same internet influences. Even the physical world is rendered with modest sameness everywhere by Google Maps and its humbling Street View. Plot gets lost in a statistical or redundant picture of flows and supply chains that move bits and persons and commodities from anywhere to anywhere.

The optimistic theme is that this stage’s losses for representation of individuals and locality can be offset by gains as ever more people are drawn into a world system. An unexpected key word that stands out in Jameson’s recent writing is “population.” While “the new” seems to enclose and even “singularize” each mind in a cocoon of preferences and “likes,” it dialectically produces the absorption of billions into collectivities on platforms that confirm their deeper identity and affirm their human needs. The weight should be felt politically, except that ever-new digital forms commodify effort and thingify (“reify”) spontaneity:

We can also see globalization, or this third stage of capitalism, as the other side or face of that immense movement of decolonization and liberation which took place all over the world in the 1960s. . . . Now, suddenly, the bourgeois subject is reduced to equality with all these former others.

If each personality simply becomes anonymous, it is “a good anonymity. . . . Billions of real people now exist, and not just the millions of your own nation and your own language.” Premonitions of unleashing this real existence of vast populations are a cause for jubilation for Jameson. He quotes Peter Sloterdijk to the effect that “people today are not prepared to coexist consciously with a billion other subjects,” but proposes we seek the unalienating forms with which to make this possible.

In Jameson’s writing from the past decade, including the recent reviews collected in Inventions of a Present, I detect an increasing freedom and joyfulness in his tone. Jameson generally seems hardheaded, but there is a ribbon of mysticism that runs through his work, varying in width from lace to filament. I mean this in the sense of an unexpected and unseen unity in the spirit of all things, the visible and invisible, beyond the threshold of experience and the flashes of intuition of this unity in consciousness. It arises thematically in his occasional invocations of religion and theology, to which he is impressively not allergic, and constitutionally in his sketchings of the dialectic, to which he has devoted chapters and books. “Any comparison of Marxism with religion is a two-way street,” he once argued; he meant that religion might have been waiting to find its real prophetic truth in Marxism, as “religious concepts” of messianism, providence, and primitive magic become “anticipatory foreshadowings” of their discovered true form in the dialectic of class struggle. If the voice of these dialectics sounds mystically unifying, that is perfectly sensible so long as “we take dialectical thought to be the anticipation of the logic of a collectivity which has not yet come into being.”

Of the string of Nobel Prize winners in literature that Jameson reviews in Inventions of a Present, the most recent is Olga Tokarczuk. He tackles her historical novel The Books of Jacob, worked from the events of the life of Jacob Frank, a mortal taken for the messiah in eighteenth-century Poland and surrounded by crowds and sects and opponents. This review ends Jameson’s book. It is dizzying, loose in the very recent, almost madcap or zany style of Jameson’s reviews, addressed to “you” and spoken by “we,” as if Jameson were one of the eighteenth-century followers, or a character within the book, or the narrative voice itself: “As for Jacob’s charisma, we have our own testimonies.” Because many of his own key words and classic gestures self-consciously reappear, it is as if Jameson is rewriting Tokarczuk writing the documents of Jacob Frank—thus also trying to merge his voice with a collective voice, one of open commitment to the coming of the messiah, open belief. “What is important here,” Jameson writes, “is that Olga Tokarczuk has learned to do the impossible: to write the novel of the collective.” We arrive at the very moving, though somewhat amazing, final lines of his review, ahead of the blank space that marks the end of Inventions of a Present. These words are borrowed from Tokarczuk, but they express something of Jameson’s:

The Messiah is something more than a figure and a person—it is something that flows in your blood, resides in your breath, it is the dearest and most precious human thought: that salvation exists. And that’s why you have to cultivate it like the most delicate plant, blow on it, water it with tears, put it in the sun during the day, move it into a warm room in the night-time.

The hope that Jameson wants to hold to and cherish is surely not Jacob Frank. The delicate seedling that must be watered, and sheltered, and sunned, and grieved, sounds like socialism. This strenuous husbandry is also part of the double achievement of Jameson: not only to have said so much of brilliance and utility, but to have existed and endured, uncompromising and uncompromised. His has been a voice of implacability that becomes a form of courage, proven by holding a moment’s hope or ecstasy over years and decades of patient labor, while other things run to sand, and all in order to keep our eyes fixed there too. A remarkable ending, and last words, for the book of a Marxist critic.